In many areas of the food industry, it is desirable for certain food to be prepared in portions which are as accurate and equal in weight, shape and size as possible.
Modern food industry demands high levels of productivity and precision. It is the aim of the producer and requests of the buyer to obtain as accurate portion size as possible. It is also an important factor that the objects, in this case fish or meat portions have a certain configuration and/or thickness due to the end buyers' requests. Enhanced processing technology would lead to much better utilization of raw material and thus cost-effectiveness of processing.
It would be desirable if the production and further processing of meat products such as i.e. beef, pork or turkey could be cut and prepared in portions which are almost identical. Correspondingly equally sized portions of meat could then be processed further or sold optimally.
Corresponding calibrating devices have been disclosed for shaped and processed meat, in which the meat is initially processed and then pressed together again to take on a certain shape. However, this requires the stringy meat to be processed into very small pieces or involves utilizing meat residues. A calibrated cutting installation having a shaping tube for feeding the meat to a cutting device in order to separate meat into portions which are as much as possible of equal size by means of a cutter has already been disclosed. The shaping tube can be separated into two parts in the longitudinal direction. The end of the shaping tube, at a so-called delivery hole, is adjoined by pot-shaped or shell-shaped depressions, the size and volume of which predetermine the corresponding portion. Then, a cutter can be moved through a spacer gap between the feed hole of the shaping tube and the abovementioned calibrated shaping cavity, the oblique arrangement of the cutting edges of the cutter causes a pulling cut, with the result that the corresponding amount of meat situated in the calibrated shaping cavity can be separated from the large remaining amount of meat situated in the shaping tube. Then, the pot-shaped calibrating plate can be moved in order to remove the amount of meat which is situated in the calibrating cavity from the calibrating cavity and, for example, to deliver it to a conveyor belt.
A device for cutting pieces of raw meat into dices or strips has already been disclosed. Since meat in the thawed state is too yielding and soft to be cut into dice or longitudinal strips, some of these known methods require the meat to be partially frozen beforehand. It may even be necessary for the piece of meat to be laterally compressed prior to cutting so that it can then be forced out of a pressing cavity. However, known methods of this type are generally only able to produce unevenly portioned slices, since the small pieces of meat are often not cut through cleanly.
In view of the above prior art, the object of the present invention is to provide an improved calibrated cutting device which can be used to portion any type of food that is suitable for cutting, in particular meat, with or without bones, as optimally as possible, with the minimum possible weight, shape and size discrepancies.